Nonprofits given ax by DOC last year return to work on Rikers for free
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Around half a year after the Department of Correction cut a contract with several nonprofits providing programming on Rikers, two of those organizations have returned to provide a limited number of services at no cost to the DOC. File photo by Gerardo Romo/NYC Council Media Unit
By Jacob Kaye
A little more than half a year after the Department of Correction cut a contract with half a dozen nonprofit service providers, two of those organizations have been asked to again provide programming to detainees on Rikers Island – and to pay for the services out of their own pockets.
The Fortune Society and Osborne Association this month returned to the city’s troubled jail complex to provide limited services to detainees who have largely been deprived of more robust programming and services over the past seven months after the DOC cut the $17 million contract with the organizations last July.
Though the DOC, led at the time by former commissioner and now-Assistant Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Louis Molina, claimed last year that it would be able to provide the services in-house, data shared by the mayor’s office in January said otherwise. During the first four months after the contract was severed, the number of group-based programming offered to detainees on Rikers Island dropped by 29 percent and one-on-one sessions dropped by over 30 percent when compared to the same period the year prior, as first reported by the Eagle.
Given the DOC’s failure to provide the services on its own, Fortune and Osborne were asked by recently-appointed Commissioner Lynelle Maginley-Liddie to again return to Rikers to offer their services. One of the organizations returned to Rikers on Monday.
However, the amount of programming that will be offered by the groups won’t be as robust as they were under the former contract. Additionally, the nonprofits will have to eat the costs of the programming for the foreseeable future.
Maginley-Liddie subtly revealed the nonprofits’ “self-fund[ed]” return during a Board of Correction meeting on Wednesday.
“As I was appointed commissioner, I reached out to Fortune and Osborne and asked them to return to assist as they could,” Maginley-Liddie said.
According to the commissioner, the Fortune Society began its work at the start of this week and is working exclusively in the Eric M. Taylor Center, the second-most populous jail facility on Rikers. There, the organization has begun to provide transitional planning services and employment services. Fortune is also screening detainees and assessing whether or not they will be eligible to participate in any of the alternatives to incarceration programs the nonprofit provides.
Stanley Richards, the CEO and president of the Fortune Society, told the Eagle on Wednesday that though he and his organization are glad that they got to return to Rikers to offer the needed services, he lamented the fact that they can’t “have the robust programming we once had before the $17 million cut.”
“I hope that the administration finds the resources to be able to make that investment,” Richards said.
Richards said he was unable to provide the Eagle with the number of detainees expected to participate in the programming or how that number would compare to participation in programming during the life of the previous contract.
However, he anticipated that the number of participants would be far fewer than the number they had a year ago under the contract.
When operating under the contract, Fortune alone had nearly 100 staff members, a bulk of whom were formerly incarcerated, working in four Rikers facilities five days a week. The organization offered trauma-informed group therapy, educational groups, motivational groups, relapse prevention classes, art skills training and more.
Now, they are operating in only one facility with only five staff members, and at no cost to the DOC. The funds to pay for the staff and the other costs associated with the programming will come from elsewhere in the organization’s budget.
“This work isn't a job for us – this is our commitment, this is our life's work,” said Richards, who was formerly incarcerated himself and also once a top official with the DOC. “We want to support the commissioner and find out ways we can work, but we're clear-eyed – it's a limited scope of work that we're going to be able to do and we hope that the city invests appropriate resources so we can do it as robustly as we've done before.”
City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who chairs the Council’s Criminal Justice Committee, called the DOC’s request that the organizations return to work for free “absurd.”
“I don’t see how DOC can rationalize asking these organizations to return to do critical work at Rikers without a new contract,” Nurse told the Eagle. “If DOC is serious about rehabilitation and setting up detainees for success, as well as safely reducing the jail population, it must put resources toward the program providers that know how to do this work.”
A DOC spokesperson told the Eagle that while Fortune’s work will be limited, the department’s Division of Programs and Community Partnerships will continue to provide “a wide variety of support for people in custody provided by in-house staff, outside partners, and contracted providers.”
When asked why the DOC asked the organizations to return, the spokesperson said, “Commissioner Maginley-Liddie believes in the critical importance of programs for people in custody and reached out to these two groups because she wanted them back in the jails.”
‘Penny-wise and pound-foolish’
The initial plan to cut the contract with Fortune, Osborne, SCO Family of Services, Greenhope Services for Woman and Fedcap Rehabilitation Services came as a shock to the organizations, who still had around a year of work left to do under the contract.
The DOC had proposed the cut after Mayor Eric Adams in May of last year asked each city agency to reduce its spending by 4 percent. The $17 million cut accounted for less than one percent of the DOC’s total $1.2 billion budget and around 0.01 percent of the city’s total budget.
The mayor’s office, which has since restored a number of the budget cuts it proposed last year, did not respond to requests for comment on the organizations' unpaid return to Rikers.
The decision to cut the contract quickly received pushback from the providers, advocates and lawmakers in the City Council who have generally been critical of the mayor’s management of Rikers Island – the population of the jail has grown steadily under Adams who has also taken little action to prepare the jail complex for its legally-mandated closure in August 2027.
At the time, DOC brass justified the cut by claiming that attendance at the organizations’ programming was poor and that the services could be provided more effectively by in-house staff. However, the DOC did not provide evidence that attendance was lacking, nor did they detail their plan for ensuring the programming continued without the organizations inside the jails.
“I think time told the story,” Richards said on Wednesday. “DOC didn't have the capacity to provide the level of intensity and comprehensiveness of services we provided and the result of that was that services significantly decreased.”
In the January Mayor’s Management Report, the department made note that it had been unable to provide the same level of services once the organizations had left.
Richards said the programming is necessary because it helps reduce idle time for the detainees.
Without it, “there's opportunity for chaos, and mayhem, and hopelessness and despair to set in and those things are the breeding grounds for violence, and discontent,” Richards said.
“The decision to cut the $17 million was a decision that was in the bucket of penny-wise and pound-foolish,” he added.
The nonprofit leader told the Eagle that he remains hopeful that Maginley-Liddie, who he formerly worked with at the DOC, will continue to increase programming for detainees and fight for the funds needed to do so.
“I think she is really focused on reestablishing the partnerships,” Richards said.
There currently is no timeline for how long the pair of nonprofits are expected to provide the programming on Rikers. Similarly, there doesn’t appear to be a promise that they’ll be working toward a new, funded contract.
Richards said the work will continue anyway.
“This isn't about funding for us,” he said. “These are the folks that we serve, and the more we can do for people while they're on the inside and transitioning into the community, the better it is for them, the better it is for the communities that they come from and their families.”
Update: This story was updated on Friday, March 1, 2024, at 1:20 p.m. with comment from the Department of Correction.
